I'm the publisher of Forbes magazine, where I write a biweekly column called Innovation Rules. I'm also a regular panelist on cable news' popular business show, Forbes on FOX (with an average viewership of 1.2 million households per show in 2012), and frequent guest analyst on CNBC's The Kudlow Report. My 2004 book, Life 2.0, was a Wall Street Journal business bestseller. I'm also an entrepreneur, an active angel investor, and sit on three outside boards. For co-founding Silicon Valley's largest public affairs organization, the 6,500-member Churchill Club, I'm a past Northern California winner of Ernst & Young's prestigious "Entrepreneur of the Year Award." I earned a B.A. from Stanford University. I lecture up to 50 to 60 times a year on the innovation economy.

With such a title, and from such a friendly organ, at first I thought Jodi Kantor’s piece would be a collection of Obama’s greatest political wins: His rapid rise in Illinois, his win over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the passage of health care, and so on.

But the NYT piece is not about any of that. Rather, it is a deep look into the two outstanding flaws in Obama’s executive leadership:

1. How he vastly overrates his capabilities:

But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, adding that the same thing happened to his former boss. “There’s a reinforcing quality,” he said, a tendency for presidents to think, I’m the best at this.

2. How he spends extraordinary amounts of time and energy to compete in — trivialities.

For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand (“You’re not playing, you’re just gambling,” he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer).

His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.

Kantor’s piece is full of examples of Obama’s odd need to dominate his peers in everything from bowling, cards, golf, basketball, and golf (104 times in his presidency). Bear in mind, Obama doesn’t just robustly compete. The leader of the free world spends many hours practicing these trivial pursuits behind the scenes. Combine this weirdly wasted time with a consistent overestimation of his capabilities, and the result is, according to NYT’s Kantor:

He may not always be as good at everything as he thinks, including politics. While Mr. Obama has given himself high grades for his tenure in the White House — including a “solid B-plus” for his first year — many voters don’t agree, citing everything from his handling of the economy to his unfulfilled pledge that he would be able to unite Washington to his claim that he would achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Those were not the only times Mr. Obama may have overestimated himself: he has also had a habit of warning new hires that he would be able to do their jobs better than they could.

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Though he never ran a large organization before becoming president, he initially dismissed internal concerns about management and ended up with a factionalized White House and a fuzzier decision-making process than many top aides wanted.

Kantor’s portrait of Obama is stunning. It paints a picture of a CEO who is unfocused and lost.

Imagine, for a minute, that you are on the board of directors of a company. You have a CEO who is not meeting his numbers and who is suffering a declining popularity with his customers. You want to help this CEO recover, but then you learn he doesn’t want your help. He is smarter than you and eager to tell you this. Confidence or misplaced arrogance? You’re not sure at first. If the company was performing well, you’d ignore it. But the company is performing poorly, so you can’t.

With some digging, you learn, to your horror, that the troubled CEO spends a lot of time on — what the hell? — bowling? Golf? Three point shots? While the company is going south?

What do you do? You fire that CEO. Clint Eastwood was right. You let the guy go.

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Good CEO’s surround themselves with competent people and trust that they are professional and talented enough to make the CEO look good. A good CEO does not compete with his employees and try to micro-manage them.

Has he done the job he promised to do? Remember, he was in COMPLETE control for almost 2 years, with a solid majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. He couldn’t do ONE THING right.

Although, actually he did a lot of things right, or at least failed to do the wrong thing. He didn’t close Gitmo, and didn’t have the guts to bail on Iraq. He refused to bail out the jobs program that NASA had become, and has allowed the private sector to develop the next manned rocket system; the next FOUR manned rocket systems, perhaps. Competition is a GOOD thing.

But Obamacare is just one more enormous already-failing medical bureaucracy, and all the cost savings will come from Sarah Palin’s “death panels”. So my wife is no longer recommended to have mammograms, and I’m not supposed to get a PSA test, or other expensive medical tests; better for the Almighty State for me to die young, especially since the government already IS on the hook for my (military/TRICare) medical care.

I’m not encouraged by his current flailing. His first executive decision was to select the plagiarist-in-chief Joe Biden as his VP; that decision ALONE should have made Barack ineligible for higher office.

He’s not doing the job. Hell, he’s never done ANY job. As State Senator he voted “present” because he was too scared to make any decision, and in the US Senate he was too busy running for President to actually learn what a Senator does. He has never had a job in his ENTIRE life.

That’s true: The writer never said Obama is a lousy CEO. In fact, I’m positive the article intended the sort of obligatory fulsome praise of the Leader that one would more readily expect to see in the Pyongyang Times.

Asking Mr. Karlgaard for a quote is pointless, because Kantor’s piece reads like an Iowahawk satire. Kantor’s article ran under the sardonic headline, “Obama is awesome” on a CONSERVATIVE website, yesterday.

Not really, this piece was saying he was a lousy CEO because he is overconfident and spends too much time preparing for pointless competitions. That he golfs twice a month does not keep me up at night, nor does it matter to me if he spends an extra two hours filling out his bracket for March Madness.

The article comes off as desperate, lazy, poorly thought out and extremely inferential. It certainly did not focus on “results,” which have been mixed under Obama. They have not been superlative as the left would aver with their fudged figures nor on pace for 1000 years of darkness as the right’s demon deacon sermons aver.

Vickery: Don’t you have some kind of quota on the number of times you can post/reply on this board? If you did, I believe you would have hit it already.. anyways..

I think you will find many of us “Shareholders” happen to believe that the CEO of our country has failed miserably and should not be given another “contract” of 4 years. He should instead be replaced. He has had enough time to prove the can run the “company” and obviously he’s too busy to do that while perfecting his golf and card playing skills. So he can do that on his own dime.. not mine!

aside from the title the words lousy CEO don’t appear together in the article … nice try to distract Vickery

to quote you: “The qualities of being hyper competitive, over confident and hard working are universal to CEOs (many of which are profiled in Forbes and on its power lists), and political office holders and candidates, both good and bad.”

the thing, is nobody claims Obama is a hard worker (other than Michelle) the NYT article certainly didn’t … I’ve known alot of hyper competitive, over confidant losers in my day … I would put Obama in that class as well …

Please name one real accomplishment of his that showed some sort of exceptional skill or talent ? You don’t even know what grades he received now do you … good lord, he couldn’t even make his high school basketball team starting lineup …

I do not have a profile on this site. I have never been paid to write an article for affluent consumers or C-level audiences – for Forbes or any other publication for that matter. I am, however, a relatively successful former CEO having run 3 public companies, orchestrated a half dozen business combinations (mergers), and having created approximately $5.8 billion (with a “B”) in quantifiable shareholder returns. As such, I feel I have something to offer on the topic of what traits are generally present (or conspicuously lacking) in a successful CEO.

In reading the Times article, the following lines (a reference which, in fairness, was taken from the New Yorker) jump out at me:

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

If this is true, then I will go out on my own and say he is ill suited to run a small business of more than 50 employees, let alone a major corporation. Knowing one’s limitations and surrounding oneself with giants (in terms of talent) is a near universal quality among successful business leaders. Anything else creates a single point of failure and creates a ridiculous bottleneck and artificial downer in terms of accountability, decision making, team morale, creativity, and leadership development. This is pretty basic. I can only hope the original quote (attributed to Obama) is false. Anything else is simply a catastrophic approach to management.